#j. sullivan

[lunchboxpoems]

[skinreflectsthesun]

They say men want freedom and girls want love, but I’ve seen women leave lovers and countries and kingdoms of comfort just for the chance to sleep unbothered, to bathe unwatched, to waltz around apartments all their own, wearing nothing but lipstick- the color of desire.

- J. Sullivan

[absenceisaformofwinter]

[imaginemirage]

Look, America is awful and the earth is too hot and the truth of the matter is we're all up against the clock. It makes everything simple and urgent: there's only time to turn toward what you truly love. There's only time to leap.

J. Sul;livan

[popcornbutterfly]

[dig-with-it]

The electrician sings "Easy Love" in the kitchen while fixing my light

Sea ice around Antarctica reaches a record low and now, on the news, a man rushes down the streets of Kyiv, his toddler in his arms. The word war enters every room. Earth warms. In Texas, a child grows bright with grief. Everything threatens to burst. In the morning, my belly asks again for a baby. I leak with longing. No one has told my body yet about the world. All she hears is the sound of someone in the other room. still singing.

— J. Sullivan

[puddlin]

today has been a poetry day. its my favourite kinds of days, where work fades to the back of my mind as time and time im pulled back to poems.

today has been a poetry day. ive read poems and cried, and ive read poems and laughed.

i've read them softly and aloud to myself on a park bench, over and over and over until they have washed over every taste-bud. until they have fermented with the emotions they stir in the walls of my mind. i bottle them up for later.

i've read them silently and alone in the corner of a library, silence only interrupted by my shaky exhales as i am overcome- as i am consumed. consumed by these sentences, strung together with each carefully selected words. i am overwhelmed by the mundanity, the beauty of it. the honesty of poets, and the act of this undressing of the self, an act done with such care and unbound love. a devotion to the freeing of the self in all its complexities and contradictories.

Today has been a poetry day and it is one of my favourite kinds of days. I am overwhelmed by the weight of people i will never know. These people, who have reached into my very core and clawed at my heart. I am left raw and bleeding and alive. i laugh and i taste blood on my lips.

i wade into the surf and let myself be submerged. there is a thrill to being pulled over, slammed by the swelling of wave upon you, even when it sends you tumbling back to shore, twisting and turning beneath water, sand in hair and clothes and mouth. but you pull yourself up from the swirling waters. you stumble back into the surf, with joy on your lips and the taste of laughter and salt on your tongue, and that is poetry to me. this is poetry to me. it is living.

[renewedwarmth]